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Making Music. Tunes by Idle Thumbsters

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Other than messing around with a trial of FrootyLoops very little, I have no experience making music, other than poorly playing a guitar for a few years. You've made me curious about this Music Creator 7. I'm honestly only looking to poke around with it for a spot of fun, and maybe make some stuff I would like to listen to myself. Nothing professional. Do you think it would be a good fit for a beginner like me or are there other better options? 

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I would not recommend Music Creator 7 to a beginner. If you want to play around with something mostly similiar to the midi-workstation stuff in MC7, try Nanostudio out which has a learning curve of its own. I believe that the windows and mac desktop versions are free.

http://www.blipinteractive.co.uk/download.php

The biggest reason I wanted to use MC7 is that I miss having a looping staff-view which is the way I used to make songs a decade ago. I'll make a short video to show what I'm talking about, but basically I like to have traditional western musical-notation that I can write midi with. There are probably better programs to do this with, but I don't know what they are. Oddly a japanese import DS game called Daigasso! Band Brothers! is the best other option I am aware of. After you beat the rhythm-game campaign, you can write midi in staff-view. Somehow my physical cartridge just stopped working though, and of course it was lacking in options. I'd be interested in hearing other recommendations for digital audio workstations that allow folks to make midi in staff-view.

NanoStudio is pretty great, but there is no staff-view. You can write songs with a piano-roll which is like punching holes out of paper for a player-piano roll of music, but there is no staff-view. The synths in NanoStudio are also really fun to play with, but are a bit more toyish than the synths that come with MC7.

With MC7:

-I paid $35 for it

-The official documentation is alright.

-There doesn't seem to be a substantial community doing things like making tutorials.

-I had to update the audio-driver on my motherboard to get the playback to stop skipping.

-You have to pay $10 for the license to export to .mp3

-There are additional, DLC synth-packs that assumably integrate well into MC7.

-The learning curve is pretty steep since the interface is Blenderesque in its willingness to try and do something for everyone.

-I don't regret the purchase, but it takes a considerable time-investment to get to the point where you are noodling.

I'll make a video to show you what I've figured out so far. That way you can see the midi workflow (or atleast what I know of it).

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I made a video trying to show my midi-composition workflow in Musc Creator 7.


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Downloaded Nanostudio and have been playing around with it a bit. This is more of the sort of thing I was looking for, and free! Thanks for the suggestion clyde. Maybe I will make something that sounds OK. 

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I know that the Finale series of products also allows composing using MIDI instruments on a traditional music staff sheet, and many years ago I used an old version of that to write music with. I have no idea what the current capabilities of that software is, but I imagine that aspect at least is still the same.

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Sibelius is another notation software like Finale. For more full featured workstation software there's Digital Performer by MOTU, but it's probably in the ballpark of an order of magnitude more than $35. Logic and Pro Tools also have score views, though personally I've never actually used it in Pro Tools I've just used Sibelius and sent stuff into Pro Tools (it's integrated into Pro Tools as both are by Avid, but I think you can also rewire Sibelius into any DAW).

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I got myself a Bitwig license for Christmas. As a former Ableton user I'm sometimes frustrated by the relatively limited feature set, but I really like the extensive modulation options, it's very easy to make crazy chains of devices controlling each other.

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Music Creator 7 is on sale for $20 today.

 

I should also mention that I'm coming around to it. Getting everything initialized for your particular setup can be kind of confusing and frustrating (and necessary), but now that I have it set up and I bought the woodwinds DLC, I'm pretty impressed with all the interfaces I can use and how good the synths sound. 

-I adjusted the buffer size to 20ms and it feels good now (and sounds right) when I use the virtual keyboard. 

-Going between the virtual keyboard and the staff-view and having a decent sense of the cut/copy/paste functionality is allowing me to do what I want to do in a reasonable amount of time. 

-I really do like playing the synths. Just making chords experimentally with the virtual keyboard is chilling me the fuck out.

 

 

I made a short melody-line with my new wind ensemble.
 

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My song is progressing. I'm starting to think that I'm ripping off a Björk song in the theme, but I haven't spent the time to figure out which one. 
 

 

Edit: I think I'm safe. I suspect that I was thinking of the overture from Dancer In the Dark which isn't melodically similar.

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Would anyone else be interested in a song-making jam-event. This type of thing is helpful for me in making games and I figure it can give me quick gains in music-composition too.

I'd like to do something soon and something that only takes a couple of hours. So I'll just throw out a date to see if there is any interest.

Anyone want to make a song Tuesday night? and then submit it here?

I'll start around 8pm. How about a soft deadline of 12am your time.

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Do you want to set a theme for the songs? On my old music collective's site we use to do monthly songwriting compilations where the prompt was a single word.

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Well that site was mostly folk/anti-folk people, so the word generally worked it's way into the lyrics and could be anything like "Hand", "Stingray" and "Keep". If this is going to be mostly instrumentals (which I think most people in this thread stick to), perhaps a word more evocative of a mood or tone would be better. 

 

It's your proposal so I'll let you come up with it. Also I am going to do this if only because being able to finally write a song that uses more than three chords will be very cathartic.

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Yeah I'd be into something like that, though due to my current sleep schedule those particular hours don't work for me my time. I can just work in a 4 hour block and be confident that that covers 8-12 in some time zone though.

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Yeah I'd be into something like that, though due to my current sleep schedule those particular hours don't work for me my time. I can just work in a 4 hour block and be confident that that covers 8-12 in some time zone though.

That's the spirit.

Do you have an evokative mood word perchance?

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Heater.

I like that.

I think I'll make it so it gets more intense the longer you are exposed to it. But it'll also have a nice comforting, expansive drone.

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Here is a friendly reminder that you can make a song in 4 hours tonight and then submit it here while others hopefully do the same!

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Nice. Atmospheric.

Here's what I have so far. I figured if it was gonna heat up it better start pretty chilly, so I went with kind of a wintry sound to start with. I started um about 90 minutes ago, but stopped to do some stuff in between and otherwise procrastinate.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/100710544/Heater.mp3

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I enjoy the permutations of the lead chords in the late section of 2 minutes.
How do you make your file show up in the post like that?
Also I like how the wind contextualizes the need of a heater.

I added some string chords to mine. I'm not sure if I'll be able to improve this with a lead, but I'm going to experiment with laying something on top for a while until it's time to give up or I find something that works.
https://soundcloud.com/clydebink/heaters-gonna-heatwip2

 

Edit 3 hours in: Yeah. I painted myself into a corner on this one. I can't add anything onto it. I don't know enough about music to know why it doesn't sound right to add anything on. I think that my process is usually to add layers in the order of simple-to-complex; I used a timbre(?) that is good for my simple-range to write the melody and now anything I add onto it just sounds like someone jamming out on top. I'm happy enough with it as it is though. I'm going to stop because I'm sleepy.

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Apparently these forums just automatically embed dropbox links like that, which is handy. I had no idea at the time!

Atmospheric cues like that feel vaguely cheaty in some ways, but I really feel like stuff like that becomes part of the music and adds a lot of naturalistic texture and tone to a scene.

 

Strings very much change the feel of the piece. Now it feels kind of like you're in the boiler room of some kind of arctic facility in an atmospheric adventure game.

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